A few days ago, I saw a video with Joker, Brain from Tech Yes City and Wendell. They broke character for a few and started talking about Xeons. I wonna make that jump! Any tips or insights?
Well what exactly do you want to do?
We talking a server? A serious workstation? Or just something for general use and games?
Budget?
It's been promoted by Linus and Tek for about a year now. Unless you're a media convertor/person or VM type person there really isn't a benefit. It's basically like the i5 4 cores vs. xeon 6 core debacle. If your just a casual media person and gamer I would just stick to a single xeon machine. The reason behind it all is it's cheaper to buy a socket 2011 (non v3) or get two of them verses a x99 setup or a single 4960x/5960x processor. They are in that sweet spot if you're already on a x79 or have multiple VM/video encoding in background and want to 'GAME'. You're sacrificing Ram speed (ddr3) and possibly pcie 3.0 just for that cheap low tech.
Keep in mind this is for people whom already built a nas, and 2nd guest computer and their own gaming PC. I would be devastated if you spent $2000+ on and setup and get all mad cuz you're not getting 2X 5960x performance.
My easiest comparsion is to get a stock HP xw4600 or a HP z800 xeon series:
If you're really into PC you'd know this like years back. Every 2-3 iterations the last 2-3 gen. is being sold dirt cheap. The linus and tek actually drove prices on amazon and ebay on the selected build by 20-200% in pricing, until the demand drops back down to liquidation prices again.
Make sure your use case actually warrants a behemoth CPU with ECC and VT-D support. An LGA115X Core i3 will match or exceed the 1-2 thread performance of some really expensive LGA2011 Xeons. From Haswell and up, I think the Core i3's all support all the fancy stuff Xeons do (ECC being the main one), except for VT-D (for virtualization). If you're building a home server or something that doesn't need 4 or more fast cores, i3's are Xeons for realistic budgets.
If you want to go for the crazy stuff, and don't want to get (amazingly) low priced last-gen hardware, the Xeon E5-1650V3 is pretty kickass for the price. Wait for Broadwell EP to drop, it may positively shake up the market. Just keep in mind that while one uber fast computer (maybe running a few VM's, virtual Windows Gaming anyone?) is likely more expensive than a couple mainstream machines of equal compute power.
If you decide to build a server, I really recommend SuperMicro's server/workstation boards. I got one of the LGA1150 board to match my i3, it's really clumsy and kinda ghetto, but it's reliable as a tank. Plus it's got IPMI and some other management features, and dual Intel NICs. You could easily run PFSense in a VM and use the dual nics for some firewall action. I'd check if you need VT-D before buying the CPU though.
I have a few systems, a z800 with 2 x X5677 (quads at 3.43GHz), one with an i7-2600, and one with an i5-3570.
The i5-3570 is overall the best gaming system, having lot's of multi-thread performance is really only worth it if you perform tasks that need it, or you like to render video whilst you game.
I'd also recommend avoiding older six-core Xeons that can often be found for cheap if you mainly game. Their single thread performance really suffers due to the low clock speed. You do get single thread performance somewhat similar to AMD's current line-up so its not terrible provided you don't pay too much for them. Of course you might have a board which permits over-clocking which alters that somewhat - but I don't think any dual-socket boards do.
Here are a bunch of my best Geekbench3 scores for CPU's I have owned over the past 3 years to help illustrate. Key point to note - a quad core Sandybridge i7 will outperform a hex core X5650 due to higher clock-speeds. The Xeons here were in a Z800 workstation, there is little you can do to optimize them. All the other CPU's were on Motherboards that permitted them to be boosted so that all cores ran at turbo (or better frequencies).
I'd argue that geekbench wouldn't be the best way of testing this, as the real gains to be seen in a xeon are multi-CPU workloads, and workloads that split EXTREMELY well, with little downtime. Sure the I7 might work better overall, but you can't expect the stable performance that you can out of a Xeon
The multi-threaded geekbench3 tests are good indicator to performance, but nothing is perfect - you really need to baseline your intended workloads.
With regard to multi-CPU workloads you are better off with a single 8 core part over two separate CPU's with 4 cores each. This is because Windows and Linux will recognize them as separate NUMA nodes - each CPU has its own bank of RAM and the OS will (or may be forced to) use only a single NUMA node for any given workload. If it does split the load across both CPU's there can be a penalty as memory is cross-referenced from each node. It's for reasons like this that multi-threaded benchmarks don't scale as neatly when a second CPU is introduced (check out the multi-threaded Geekbench3 scores for the X5650 when it is a single CPU and dual CPU - it is not twice as fast.)
With regards to stability I'd always argue you should be using a Xeon with ECC memory rather than a consumer part if you are doing work that generates you income and your machine will be up 24/7 rendering etc. Most enthusiasts simply don't require that though and the number of errors that occur in enthusiast level kit has dropped significantly in recent years as material quality and fabrication processes have improved - Pugentsystems have some good blog posts on this subject.
Overall, if you want to build a multi-CPU system and can get the parts at a good price go for it, but I'd be swapping out my Z800 with its Westmere era dual CPU's, 48Gb RAM and 16 threads for a decent i7-6xxxx setup if it was my only system.